India’s big fat wedding playbook goes global

With the star-studded ‘I-do’ of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, Americans have officially joined the Great Desi Wedding Phenomenon. Even as internet fan pages and global media obsess about who was invited and who was not, the spectacle of two ridiculously rich and famous people getting hitched is suddenly far more engrossing than any other news, war and football included. While back home Aamir Khan’s low-key wedding is getting some coverage, the T&T affair seems to have put everything else in shade. Is this the latest cultural cue that the West is borrowing from India after Kolhapuri chappals and diaphanous dupattas?

Celebrity weddings are the stuff media dreams are made of. To be fair, we’ve had our share of the shaadi-spotlight with the Ambani wedding, which grabbed both headlines and imaginations across the world for weeks on end. Even before that, celeb couples like Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra, Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone, Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma, among others became talking points not just in India but across the world. The T&T marriage, in fact, came on the heels of another celeb coupling when Dua Lipa and Callum Turner said 'I do'. Celebrity weddings create great pictures, racy copy and a momentary lapse of news reason among the great and good. But that’s not what we are talking about here.

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India’s fascination with weddings is an ancient cultural trait. Saint Tulsidas describes the swayamvara, baraat and divine wedding of Lord Ram with Sita in the Baal Kaanda of the Ram Charit Manas. Similarly, Mahakavi Kalidasa described the celestial wedding of Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati in Canto VII of the Kumārasambhava. Over several chapters he detailed the jewellery worn, the glow on the bride's and groom’s faces, the wedding havan and the reactions of the guests. Clearly, wedding rituals and their descriptions have always been an integral part of India’s literary traditions from very ancient times.

But the wedding culture currently in vogue is not very ancient. In fact, it is a post-liberalisation phenomenon. The first Bollywood film to capture the colours, drama, music and celebration of a desi wedding was Hum Aapke Hain Koun. The year: 1994. By then the liberalisation had made conspicuous consumption cool. That joie de vivre splashed onto the screen and resulted in a riotous celebration of song, dance and colourful costumes that India fell in love with. That was the beginning. Over the next decade or so, weddings became an integral part of Bollywood’s storytelling. From Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995) to Monsoon Wedding (2001), Vivah (2006) to Tanu Weds Manu (2011), and Veere Di Wedding (2018) to Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania (2014), blockbuster after blockbuster used the wedding trope to weave family drama with music, dance, fashion and rituals to concoct a blend as addictive as the masala chai. As the reel-life weddings changed, so did real-life ones.

And yet this was nothing like what weddings used to be in the 1960s and 1970s. Small, private and collaborative – with family and friends helping out with serving food, doing the bride’s makeup, handling guests and occasionally even driving the groom – Indian weddings back then did not have the budget needed to make them the curated affairs they are today. Even where budget was not a consideration, weddings were certainly more private. Celebrity couples from Bollywood were happy to get married in their own houses in the presence of close family and friends. Actors and actresses proudly wore heirloom jewellery and outfits. There was no intrusive social media. No destination dhamaka. No wedding couture.

This shift from the intimate to the elaborate has been best recorded by how the screen brides of Bollywood changed their looks over the years. Films like Brahmachari (1968), Aap ki Kasam (1974), Chupke Chupke (1975) or Kabhie Kabhie (1976) all show just-married characters in a red or pink wedding sari, head demurely half-covered with the pallu and a jaymala garland around the neck. The makeup would be a bindi and lipstick, and the jewellery a couple of necklaces and bangles. By the time we get to Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), the bridal look is an intricate lehenga with set pieces of jewellery. The premise is still the same; the palette and the picture are just far richer.

Today, desi weddings are as much a part of India’s soft power as Bollywood, Punjabi pop and cricket. There are travel packages that offer curious tourists the chance to participate in an Indian wedding, complete with different colour-schemed clothes for Haldi, Mehendi, Sangeet, Pheras, etc. A band-baaja-baraat wedding is not just rich people’s prerogative. Every middle-class girl on Shaadi.com has her own Pinterest page on just what her perfect wedding should look like. In the process, Indian wedding rituals have also undergone a very photogenic transformation. Often regional customs like the bride being carried into the mandap on a low wooden stool in Bengali weddings or brides being asked to sit on their father’s lap in Tamil Brahmin marriages are making way for a homogenised set of ‘functions’ like the now-ubiquitous phoolon-ki-chador or a set of colour-coordinated bridesmaids walking alongside the bride to the mandap.

The more elaborate the weddings, the more specialists it spawns to make everything Insta-perfect, from wedding planners to venue directors, music coordinators, fashion designers, makeup specialists, caterers, jewellery designers, logistics providers, florists, guest coordinators... In the process, weddings have become a multi-billion-dollar industry, worth, at last count, around $130 billion. For perspective, consider the fact that India’s vaunted automobile industry is worth around $192 billion. Weddings are not just about two people getting married. They are big business.

Which brings us back to T&T. It took the Hollywood celeb-sphere a while to realise just what an aspirational goldmine a big fat wedding can be. And while Western weddings are expanding their footprint with pre- and post-I-do parties, it takes the flamboyance and flavours of a multi-day desi extravaganza to make a wedding really count. If we can borrow bridesmaids and wedding cakes from the West, it’s time their weddings borrowed our very own haldi, mehendi and sangeet.

(Nandini Sen Gupta is a freelance writer and author of several books. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)